Each Christmas, we spend a lot of time reviewing the year just gone. We scrutinise the numbers in our businesses; sales figures, production figures, financial figures and so on……we look at the numbers that Google Analytics throws up and try to decipher what the heck it all means.

But what about the words? Do we spend as much time worrying about them as we do with figures? Probably not.

Some people do worry about the words because they don’t feel confident in their own writing abilities. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’re all different.

Many of us, however, pay lip service to the quality of the words that we write and subsequently publish. We’re so pressurised by a lack of time, the first thing that goes out the window, is the checking process. Once you’ve pressed the ‘send’ button, it’s gone; mistakes and all. You’ve lost control of it and depending on where you’ve sent it you may not even know who’s going to read it.

For many businesses there is an expectation from their readers for the words that they publish to be correct, e.g. those of you in the legal, financial, education, learning & development sectors are expected to ensure that your written material is accurate, professional-looking and above all free from errors.

The first thing that will be damaged as a result of your errors is your hard-earned reputation.

So why don’t we focus on the words we write so much nowadays? Do they not matter? I think they’re equally as important, if not more important than the figures.

‘But you’re a proofreader, you’re bound to say that’, I hear you say. So what?

Just think about HOW you promote your business.

You write words for your website

You write words on a flyer or a brochure

You write words in a newsletter

You write words in an advertisement

You write words in a blog post and on social media

I could go on and list all the other things you do that involve writing words….

If you think about it you probably write a lot more words than you do numbers so what better reason to give them the TLC they deserve this Christmas.

A really good way of giving your words some valued TLC is to make sure they are checked properly, so here are 5 top tips that you can use to proofread your own writing:

Print off what you’ve written and put it to one side. Come back to it after a couple of hours. Your eyes and brain will have done something else by then and will be fresh to have another look.

Get somebody else to read it – if they’ve got the time.

Read it out loud.

Read it backwards. Doing that you will focus on every word and check that it’s spelt correctly.

If you don’t trust your own ability or knowledge of the English language sufficiently to do it yourself – call in a trained expert.

Working with a proofreader on a regular basis will save you time and money. You’ll be able to use that time to do something more profitable for your business.

By working together, you can be confident that your writing will be conveying the right message and that your customers will have confidence in you and your business.

If you think you need some help to give your words some TLC, give me a call…

Continuing the series of extracts from my book Confident Business Writing demonstrating the benefits of following my Business Writing Process Plan –

When you first started to write your piece, you knew you wanted it to have a purpose and that you wanted to achieve a goal.

Receiving feedback, positive and negative, is exceedingly valuable. If nothing else, it means that someone has taken the time and trouble to read what you’ve written and to make comment.

In some cases, you’ll be able to put a realistic value on the feedback if you go on and sign up a new client. Feedback on a newsletter, for example, will enable you to make changes next time, if necessary. If you had a tender or funding application declined, then feedback obtained from the assessors will enable you to learn lessons for the next occasion.

Your feedback will also enable you to evaluate whether a piece of writing has been worthwhile, e.g. has it brought in any new business or raised awareness?

Confident Business Writing is for you, if:

You are a small business owner;

Your business writing is a challenge, for whatever reason;

You could have a simple process plan to follow when you are writing something in your business that will help to alleviate your worries.

There are many different ways of publishing your piece of writing. When you do publish something bear in mind that the article or document in question is leaving your business. You’re either sending it to someone specific, maybe a client, or maybe it’s entering the public domain where other people, intended or unintended, will be able to read it. Some people may not agree with you and may have negative things to say about you and your business. Be prepared.

Through your plan you will have decided how your publication is to be distributed. You may need to get it professionally printed in which case you will need to have factored in time for a printer to set up your document, produce a proof for you to verify and approve (don’t forget, printers are not proofreaders) before they press the ‘print’ button – the point of no return if you have missed an error.

Electronic distribution is even more scary because once you’ve pressed the ‘send’ button, there isn’t a point of no return. It’s gone. It’s out there in the ether somewhere and open to all sorts of scrutiny and comment, some welcome and some not!

It’s at this stage when your plan has come to fruition and your piece of writing has been finalised and published so you can move on to the next task. How good was your plan? Did you have enough time to do everything you planned? Did you hit your deadline? Can you learn any lessons for next time?

Now it’s time to monitor any feedback you may be getting. Next up, the final article in the series – Monitoring feedback.

Confident Business Writing is for you, if:

You are a small business owner;

Your business writing is a challenge, for whatever reason;

You could have a simple process plan to follow when you are writing something in your business that will help to alleviate your worries.

Continuing the series of extracts from my book Confident Business Writing demonstrating the benefits of following my Business Writing Process Plan –

Having created your content, please don’t get rid of it by publishing it straightaway. Check it first.

From my experience as a professional proofreader, this step is more often than not the one that is overlooked and is probably as important, if not more important than all the other steps in the process.

One reason that it’s overlooked is because you haven’t factored in enough time to do it before the deadline looms or you’ve just given it a cursory glance before hitting the ‘print’ or ‘send’ button and then maybe regretting it at a later date. This is how mistakes are missed and a sub-standard piece of writing is published with sometimes costly consequences.

Much will depend on what you’re writing. If you’re responding to an invitation to tender, to which a multi-million pound contract is attached, you MUST make sure that the assessors can make sense of your submission. If they can’t, then your chances of winning the contract have gone. You must therefore allow enough time in your plan for your submission to be checked so that it has the best chance of success.

A shorter or less formal piece of writing should still be checked and maybe this can be done in-house by a work colleague, always supposing they have got the time to do a proper job.

Using professional proofreaders can have significant business benefits, not least that they are more adept at picking up mistakes and grammatical issues than an author who is too close to the work and more likely to miss them.

As with engaging a copy/content writer, working with a proofreader will save you time and money that you can spend on doing what matters to you.

When you’re writing you will have your own style or ‘voice’ but spare a thought for your intended readers. Who are they? Does your style need to be a bit more formal. Your style will also be determined by the intended media through which it will be published.

So, your style and voice for a formal report or tender will be different to social media or website content.

If, for whatever reason, you feel you lack confidence in your own writing ability, and you’re not alone here, then help is at hand. You can ask a professional copy/content writer to help you.

They have the skills, experience and the time to turn your required writing into a style most appropriate for your situation. They will probably take a fraction of the time that you, and your staff, would spend and maybe fret over, and as a result the cost of such an expert will probably be a fraction of the cost of you and your staff. Not only are you saving time and money but you’re also getting back the time to spend on other business-related activities.

When you’re writing just let your creative juices flow. Leave any editing until your pen has run dry (if you’re writing long-hand) or your fingers have given up the ghost.

You’re now ready to have your document checked. Next up in the series – How do you check your writing?

Confident Business Writing is for you, if:

You are a small business owner;

Your business writing is a challenge, for whatever reason;

You could have a simple process plan to follow when you are writing something in your business that will help to alleviate your worries.

By developing a simple plan for your writing you will focus the mind on the task in hand, especially if your deadline is tight.

You will also be able to identify the precise tasks that will be involved in writing your piece. For example, you may not actually be doing the writing yourself and someone else is involved in the process in which case, sufficient time needs to be allowed for him/her to do whatever is necessary before you see the finished article.

Also, always build in some contingency time, if you can, because something will always go wrong when you’re least expecting it, so having some additional time will help to alleviate this. If you don’t use that time, that’s great but you would have regretted it if you needed it and it wasn’t there.

So, what tasks might you expect to include in your plan?

Research You may need some time to gather together all the necessary information you’re going to need to write your piece. Do you know where that information is and how easily accessible it is?

Identify who will be responsible for doing the writing Do you have the necessary time, knowledge or expertise, or will you get someone else to do the writing? Outsourcing or delegating to other people, like a copy/content writer, because they have the time, knowledge and expertise, can often help with reducing stress levels.

Provide a comprehensive brief to a copy/content writer You may need to include some time to prepare a brief so that the copy/content writer knows exactly what is expected of them. They need to understand your business and the tone/style of what you want to be written.

Establish roles and responsibilities If more than one person is involved in the process, make sure each person is clear as to their role and what they are responsible for and when they need to produce the final copy. this is especially pertinent when the deadline is short.

Set interim deadline time and dates If you know your final deadline time or date, always set some interim milestones so that you then know you’ve got sufficient time to complete subsequent tasks. These tasks must include time for checking/proofreading, printing and final publication so that you hit your deadline.

Critical Path Analysis This is a well-known planning tool that can help you to establish which tasks can be done simultaneously and which tasks rely on other tasks being completed first.

Where will you write? Think about the environment you need in order to do your writing. Do you need to book a quiet space in your office so you are away from interruptions, e.g. phone, emails or social media etc.?

This isn’t an exhaustive list but to some it may appear to be quite a long-winded process. It depends, of course, on what you’re writing. The more comprehensive and complex the document the more time you should allow especially at the back end of the process for checking, printing and publishing. Don’t leave it all to the last minute because, from my experience, the first thing that often goes out the window in a tight situation is the checking process and you end up publishing something that could be full of mistakes and then having to deal with the consequences at a later date.

Next up in this series – Create your Content.

Confident Business Writing is for you, if:

You are a small business owner;

Your business writing is a challenge, for whatever reason;

You could have a simple process plan to follow when you are writing something in your business that will help to alleviate your worries.

Before you start though, do you have a deadline by which whatever you’re writing has to be finished, submitted or published?

A deadline could be within an hour; by the end of the day; by the end of next week and so on. For some reason, we seem to have an in-built tendency to think we’ve got plenty of time before the deadline is due and consequently leave everything to the last minute. Sound familiar?

This then contributes to many issues faced by business owners when they are writing something, including increased stress levels and corner-cutting and this can lead to producing writing that is full of errors.

So, what can you do about it?

If you know your deadline time or date, then work backwards to where you are now and that will tell you how long you’ve got to write your piece and you can develop a simple plan of when it can be written.

Next up in this series – Plan your writing.

Confident Business Writing is for you, if:

You are a small business owner;

Your business writing is a challenge, for whatever reason;

You could have a simple process plan to follow when you are writing something in your business that will help to alleviate your worries.

This is the first in a series of extracts from my book Confident Business Writing demonstrating the benefits of following my Business Writing Process Plan.

Everything you write in your business should have a purpose, otherwise why are you writing it? You’re writing it to achieve something. For example:

– You may be responding to a request for information about your product or service. With your response you will want to impress your prospective client so that they do business with you.

– You may be writing a formal business report for a client based on work that you’ve carried out. You will want your report to be as comprehensive as possible and contain all the information in a format that is easily understood and that your client requires.

– You may be writing marketing content in the form of a newsletter, a flyer, a blog post etc. In each of these you will want to show your business in the best possible light to attract new clients.

The list could go on, but with every piece of writing, consider why you are writing it and what you want to achieve by writing it.

By doing this, it may well influence what you write and the style in which you write it. If you’re writing a blog post, for example, the tone of your writing will be much more informal compared to an official report or tender response.

Consider also the intended recipient or reader. Who are you writing this for? What are they going to think about it and what action do you want them to take?

Taking all these things into consideration will also make you feel more confident when you actually come to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

So, I hear you asking, what is the purpose of this book and what did I want to achieve by writing it?

I wanted to emphasise the importance of thinking about your writing and not to just go into it blindly without any real purpose. The Business Writing Process Plan which I write about in the book is a 7-step process. I’ll write about subsequent steps in future blogs.

As well as helping you to become more confident with your writing, I can also help you to make sure that it looks professional and is free from errors. Have a look round this website to find out more.

Confident Business Writing is for you, if:

You are a small business owner;

Your business writing is a challenge, for whatever reason;

You could have a simple process plan to follow when you are writing something in your business that will help to alleviate your worries.

This is the final article in the ‘Using Punctuation’ series. If you’ve been following it from Part 1, firstly, thank you and secondly, I hope you’ve found them helpful. This time, I’m looking at the closing punctuation marks: Full Stops, Question Marks and Exclamation Marks.

Full Stop

Back in the 3rd century BC, Aristophanes offered a solution to the continuous Greek writing style by having a dot to denote a pause. It is now the most commonly used punctuation mark in the English language.

Here are some examples of when a full stop should be used:

To denote the end of a sentence, e.g.

He’s my brother.

To mark the end of a group of words that don’t form a conventional sentence, so as to emphasise a statement, e.g.

We went to the football. We were very excited.

In some abbreviations, such as , Dec., p.m., e.g.

There’s a wide variety of fruit, meat, and cakes, etc. at the supermarket.

In website and email addresses, e.g.

fullstop.com

Question Mark

The question mark first appeared in the 15th century and was known as the “punctus interrogatives” (point of interrogation in Latin).

Oxford Dictionaries offers a theory on how the shape of the question mark came about – it began as a dot with a rising ‘tilde’ (.~) to denote upward inflection. Then over the years the present day shape evolved as more and more people tried to use the mark.

Here are some examples of when a question mark should be used:

After a statement that is a direct question, e.g.

Will you wash the car?

A question mark will take the place of a full stop at the end of a sentence. This means that the word that follows a question mark should be capitalised.

A question mark is not needed with an indirect question, e.g.

I wonder what the time is.

A rhetorical question is one that doesn’t expect or require an answer and therefore doesn’t require a question mark, e.g.

Why don’t you go away.

When a sentence is half statement and half question, e.g.

You will do it, won’t you?

A question mark should appear inside quotation marks when the question is within the quoted words, e.g.

He asked, ‘Will you wash the car?’

A question mark should appear outside quotation marks when the quoted words do not form a question, e.g.

Do you agree with the saying ‘Look before you leap’?

Exclamation Mark

One theory for the origin of the exclamation mark is that it comes from the Latin word for joy (“io”). The letter ‘i’ then moved above the ‘o’ and over time came to look like the present day mark.

Here are some examples of when to use an exclamation mark:

To express excitement, surprise, astonishment, or any other such strong emotion and to add additional emphasis, e.g.

Hooray! We won!

An exclamation mark replaces a full stop at the end of a sentence. This means that the word that follows an exclamation mark should be capitalised.

Why not have a go at this simple quiz to test your knowledge of when to use a full stop, a question mark and an exclamation mark:

QUIZ

For each of the following, choose the sentence that ends with the correct punctuation mark:

Instead of using commas or semi-colons, we sometimes use dashes which should not be confused with hyphens. This gets a bit more complicated depending on which side of the Pond you are.

The en-rule dash (–) tends to be used in British styles and the em-rule dash (—) tends to be used in American styles. You can see that the em-rule dash is slightly longer than the en-rule dash and they are both longer than a hyphen (-).

Back in the days of printing presses and where metal letters were set in trays, the en-rule dash was so called because it was the equivalent width of a capital ‘N’. Likewise the em-rule dash was the equivalent width of a capital ‘M’.

Dashes can be used to explain something instead of using a comma or brackets, e.g. ‘the coat – with its 4 pockets – is very popular with walkers’ or to show a sequence, e.g. 2010–2014, A–Z, Bristol–Bath

A hyphen (-), on the other hand, is not the same as an en-rule dash (–). It’s half the length for a start.

A softhyphen is inserted automatically by your word processing software when there isn’t enough room on the line. It will disappear if you move the text around. Then there is a hardhyphen which is inserted when you consciously key the mark to divide a word in two. It will stay there when you move text around.

There are some words that can be a bit misleading when they are split by a hyphen at the end of a line, e.g.